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Canadian permanent resident who served a jail sentence for robbery has been in indefinite lockup because the government wants to deport him, but Jamaica wouldn’t issue travel documents.

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Advocates are calling for the release of Alvin Brown, who has been in immigration custody for five years. Brown, a permanent resident of Canada, has been found inadmissible due to his drug and robbery convictions.

A Jamaican immigrant with a history of schizophrenia has been held in a maximum-security jail for five years and received what an expert witness called “inadequate” treatment, a court has heard.

Alvin Brown, 40, was arrested on September 8, 2011, and has since been detained at three different provincial prisons, despite efforts by border enforcement authorities to obtain a travel document for his deportation, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice was told Tuesday.

In the latest attempt to remove Brown, his scheduled January deportation to Montego Bay was cancelled at the last minute after Jamaican officials demanded additional information on the man’s mental-health needs.

“I was happy to be out of jail, to be free,” testified Brown, who was adopted by his maternal grandparents and joined them in Toronto when he was 8. However, his permanent-resident status was stripped in 2005 after a string of criminal convictions for assaults, drug trafficking, uttering threats and robberies.

Brown told the court he doesn’t think Ottawa’s new attempt to get him deported on Sept. 7 will fare much. That’s why his legal team is making a rare application to ask the court to order Canada Border Services Agency to release him if they can’t justify his indefinite detention.

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If successful, Brown’s challenge can set precedents for other long-term immigration detainees to seek release via the provincial courts — and even ask for monetary remedies from Ottawa. Brown wants court to award him $250,000.

Alvin Brown, who has been a Canadian permanent resident since he was 8, has been detained at Toronto East Detention Centre since September 2011, after he served a jail sentence for robbery. (Gary Yokoyama / The Hamilton Spectator)

“I think I will never get out of jail. It has been five years. There has been no progress,” he told Justice Alfred O’Marra. “I felt depressed when they cancelled it.”

Brown’s application was made possible with a historic decision by the Ontario Court of Appeals last year that ruled provincial courts could hear cases involving imprisonment of immigration detainees, even though immigration matters are under the federal jurisdiction.

Brown, who dropped out in Grade 9, said he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression when he was first detained in the Central North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene. He has since been prescribed with Seroquel, Remeron and Risperidone — all antipsychotic drugs.

Since January, Brown said, he has been seen only twice by a psychiatrist at Toronto East Detention Centre, each time for about five minutes. He said the regular jail lockdowns — coming almost on a nightly basis — impede his access to programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Bible studies, all held after 6 p.m.

Clinical psychologist Janet Cleveland, who has trained Immigration and Refugee Board members on mental health issues, testified she felt the treatment Brown receives in jail was “suboptimal.”

In making a case to the Jamaican consulate in Toronto for Brown’s travel-document application, Gregg Smith, a border-services senior program adviser based in Ottawa, initially told Consul Aliecia Taylor in an email that Brown was not on any medication.

Although in subsequent correspondence submitted to the court, Smith revealed Brown was prescribed medications for his mental-health problems, his condition was identified as anti-social personality disorder.

Despite Brown’s criminal convictions, “I did not see anything . . . that would support that diagnosis,” testified Cleveland, a witness called by Brown’s legal team.

Angela Beard, a border services inland enforcement supervisor for 10 years, said authorities have been trying to obtain a Jamaican travel document to deport Brown since day one, and she feels this time will be different because all required information will be ready.

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